Dean and Me: A Love Story (13 page)

Dean was flush with our new success. And so as a born gambler, and as a guy who was pretty confident about his skills around a golf course, my partner just had to get some action going. Bagsy and his pals were glad to oblige.

At first they’d just bet a couple of hundred a round, but then the stakes got heavy: four or five grand every game. You do that ten days in a row, and they’ve got you for $50,000. On the eleventh day, they’d pick you up at your house just to be courteous!

I’m told that Dean played terrific golf with these guys but just missed pay dirt. Bagsy and his pals were so good that if Dean shot a 74, they could throw a 72 (handicap factored in) at him. When he shot a 78, they got a 76. They did whatever was needed, nothing more. And oh, of course—now and then, just to break the monotony (and avoid suspicion), they’d let Dean win. Didn’t that make him feel fine!

By the time the year was over, my partner had lost over $300,000 to Bagsy and company. And talk about it was beginning to circulate around Hollywood.

For a long time, Dean never understood what hit him. He was loving the golf, and he was winning now and then. When you’re freewheeling and have bucks in your kick, you rarely take inventory. . . . After all, he was in the game, and
taking part
was all he really wanted at the time.

Let me be clear about one thing: Dean was not a fool. He was very smart, as long as you were straight. In this one instance, he acted naively because he believed that the handicaps posted in the clubhouse were earned honestly. These guys he was playing with weren’t cheating obviously. They weren’t moving the ball; they weren’t changing the numbers on the scorecard. They were coming to Dean under false pretenses, and—maybe because he spent so much of his life avoiding close relationships—that was one area where my partner was always vulnerable.

Bagsy and his pals built themselves a couple of upscale homes, complete with swimming pools, on the money they won from Dean over the next couple of years. And Hollywood was a tightly knit community. When these guys boasted, “I’m living in Dean’s other house,” or “Let’s take a dip in Dean’s pool,” word got around. In fact, after our first four years in Hollywood, rumor was that Dean had lost two or three million in all. A lot of money anytime, but especially in those days, when two or three million was what one of our movies might gross domestically.

Maybe Dean didn’t hear the gossip. Maybe he didn’t want to. In time he would learn that he’d been had, and he dumped Bagsy and his crowd, leaving that country club for others where such shenanigans didn’t take place. But he took the rip-off in stride. He never sought revenge. He just found other partners who pushed him to excellence without taking advantage of him. Ultimately, you play golf against yourself, and money wasn’t what it was about for Dean. He just wanted to play the best he could.

Golf remained Dean’s great refuge. But no matter how far he ran from people, they continued to surround him. And that was how he— and there’s no getting around it,
we
—got into trouble.

My partner’s self-esteem was a funny business. With looks, talent, and a sense of humor like his, Dean Martin should have been the soul of confidence—but if you knew him well, you could never tell when you might strike a nerve. The problem was, he was so good at covering up his vulnerabilities, you might never realize he was hurt. But I was so good at reading Dean that I almost always did.

Which is not to say that I didn’t commit my share of stupidities.

Dean was very proud of his golfing skills, and deservedly so. He took a natural gift and, instead of coasting, the way you might have expected a guy with his laid-back reputation to do, he worked very hard on his game. He might have been a one-take guy when it came to movies, radio, and TV—“You only have to tell me once” was his favorite saying to directors—but he thought nothing of practicing his putting and driving for hours at a time.

The results showed. He had a beautiful swing, and a real sense of command on a golf course. He would joke while he played (he always joked), but he still took the game very seriously. And he got better and better at it over time.

Early on, though, I stepped over the line. Feeling that it might bring us closer to play golf together, I secretly took up the game—and, to my delight, found I had some innate skill. My plan was to surprise Dean: “Isn’t this great?” I would tell him. “Now we can play together wherever we go!”

And so the day I went to Palm Springs (where Dean was taking some R&R time between films) to join him for lunch, he thought it was just lunch. He had already played nine holes when we met at the clubhouse. After we ate, Dean said, “You want to ride around with me for the back nine?”

“I’d love it!” I said. “Wait here!”

I ran from the clubhouse to my car, popped the trunk, and took out my shiny new golf shoes and my expensive new clubs. Slipped on the shoes, shouldered the bag, and ran back to Dean, who was putting on the practice green. He looked me over and just said, “I thought it would only be a matter of time before you found out how great this is!”

We both jumped into his cart and rode to the first tee. I was breathless with excitement—couldn’t wait to show off for my big brother. We hopped out, and Dean said with a big smile, “You first, pally.”

I teed the ball up with a silent prayer: Please let me be good for him.... Took my driver back—and blasted it straight down the fairway, 200 yards.

Dean blinked. “When did you learn this?” he asked. “I thought you were always in the office or the editing room!”

I admitted I’d taken lessons so we could be together more. His look told me: Wrong! But he covered it well, and we went on playing.

After we’d finished the thirteenth hole, Dean was one under and I was two over.
Not bad for a beginner!
I thought. I glanced at my partner’s face as he filled out the scorecard. Nothing. Throughout the first four holes (back nine, remember), I’d been looking for some acknowledgment of how well I was doing.

Nothing.

Then Dean said, with a strange smile, “Why don’t we make it interesting and bet the last five holes?” he said. “Five hundred bucks, winner takes all?”

“Sure!” I said. Naturally, I would have paid the five hundred just for the privilege of playing alongside him. . . . But then I birdied the fourteenth, and Dean bogeyed it. All at once it was a shooting match: He was at even par, I was one over.

Dean made par on the fifteenth, and—to my great surprise—I birdied again. Now he’s even and I’m even. We both parred the sixteenth, and I scanned his face. No reaction.

A bogey for both of us on seventeen. All tied up.

Then I hit the biggest drive of my life, so did Dean, and now we’re looking at a pretty fancy run for the roses. As I took out a nine-iron for my third shot, he put up a hand. He had a mischievous smile on his face. “Hold on, Ben Hogan,” he said.

“Of course,” I said.

“Side bet of two hundred you don’t par the hole,” he said.

“What about if I birdie?” I asked, all innocence.

He shook his head at my nerve. “Hey, hotshot, you birdie and I’ll pay you a grand!”

I didn’t birdie. (Thank God.) I parred the last hole, as did Dean, making us all even—except that he had lost the side bet. He took the bills out of his hip pocket, counted them, and handed them over. He was smiling, but his eyes were cold. “Boy, talk about beginner’s luck,” he said.

I put my hand up. “That’s okay,” I told him. “I don’t want the money.” I was beginning to feel uncomfortable.

“Oh, no,” Dean said. “A bet’s a bet.” And he stuck the bills in my pocket.

I knew in my heart I had made a great mistake. Not simply by winning the money, but just learning how to play.

When I phoned my dad and told him what had happened, you could have heard his scream across the room. “You fool!” he shouted. “You young, stupid fool! Why did you do that?”

“I just wanted to spend time together playing his favorite game,” I said sheepishly.

“All they ever write about is the skinny kid,” Dad said. “Jerry this and Jerry that—he’s the funny one, he’s the smart one. Don’t you see that all Dean ever had to himself was golf—and now you’re trying to take that, too?”

My dad was smart. Dean and I never played together again, except for a cancer benefit we did for Bing Crosby. But that was it. I never again talked to my partner about my golf, only his.

CHAPTER TEN

A NUMBER OF ENTERTAINERS STAYED OUT OF WORLD WAR II with questionable physical or psychological conditions, but both Dean and I were genuine 4-Fs. My problem was a heart murmur, a congenital defect; Dean’s was a double hernia. Nothing by halves for my partner!

Seriously, though, it had not been fun to be classified 4-F. I had badly wanted to join up, and was devastated to be turned away. (Dean, never a joiner and no fan of uniforms, might not have been as crushed as I was.) But in the mid- and late forties, both Dean and I faced audiences who accused us of draft-dodging—doubtless the same kind of people who had thrown tomatoes at the front of the Paramount Theater when Frank Sinatra, another legitimate 4-F, played there in 1944.

Although the strong emotions stirred up by the war died down by the early fifties, Dean’s hernia had gotten worse. Jack Entratter of the Copa recommended a doctor, and the doctor told Dean he would have to operate. The procedure, at the Harlem Hospital Center on 137th Street in Manhattan, went well. So well that two days afterward, my partner was complaining of hunger pains.

“Is this an endurance contest? When can I have some
real
food?” Dean said when I visited him.

“I’ll go to Lindy’s and get you some nice chicken soup,” I told him. “That’ll be good for you.” And without giving him a chance to say anything, I dashed out of his room and ran down the stairs. (Hospital elevators always have old men gasping for air in them.)

I hailed a cab and told the driver, “Take me to Lindy’s at Fifty-first Street and Broadway, and step on it!” We were just crossing 121st Street when a roar of thunder and a flash of lightning almost stopped my watch. The rain looked like something out of one of those old Saturday-afternoon King Brothers B movies where the dam breaks.

The traffic moved agonizingly slowly: A half hour later, we were only at Eighty-fourth Street, and it was another half hour before we got to the restaurant. I ran in and ordered hot chicken soup, with lots of noodles, to go. It was only when I stepped outside that I realized I should have kept the cab and let the meter run, because when it rains in New York, every taxi in the city is taken.

I started to walk. From Fifty-first and Broadway I was going to walk to the hospital at 137th and Lenox, assuring myself that I would be able to hail a cab along the way, or at least find one letting someone off. Not in this lifetime!

I am now at Seventy-eighth Street, with only fifty-nine blocks to go, and it feels as if I’ve been walking for days. I am so wet, my skin is wrinkled. Cabs are still zooming by, keeping their passengers comfy and cozy. All I see are silhouettes of happy people, dry and comfortable, while I am trying to keep my Jewish Boston Marathon going.

The next time I glance up at a street sign, I see Broadway and 112th Street. Christ, only another twenty-five blocks to go! Half the sole of my shoe has come unglued, and the faster I walk, the louder the flapping. I stop... it stops. I start, it starts. What am I doing? Just playing, but I really did feel Dean had no one but me, and I couldn’t let him down. . . .

It was four hours later when I returned to Dean’s room. He was watching television, smoking a Lucky, and totally relaxed! I scraped off the remnants of the soggy paper bag and proudly showed him the big jar of
cold
soup.

“No matzo balls?” was all he said.

I remembered the chicken-soup fiasco a couple of years later, when I tried to come up with an original present for Dean’s thirty-fifth birthday—Saturday, June 7, 1952. A big landmark, it seemed to me, but also a big challenge: What do you get for someone who has everything?

The answer to this particular riddle flashed into my aspiring director’s brain like a comic setup from one of our movies. It involved spectacle, excess, absurdity—my favorite elements!—along with a warm personal nod to my partner’s greatest passion.

I saw, in my mind’s eye, hundreds of bags of golf clubs.

Great. Now, how to make my vision real?

I drove out to the Riviera Country Club in Brentwood and told the pro at the driving range about Dean’s big birthday and my big idea. His face lit up as I talked: One of the major perks of fame is that not only does everybody know you, but they all want to do things for you, too. And as it turned out, the driving-range pro at the Riviera Country Club had more than 150 bags of clubs to rent. Now, we’re not talking fancy equipment here—this stuff was the equivalent of bowling-alley or bike-shop rentals. But the point was the big picture, not the details.

I next went to the transportation department at Paramount and talked with the head man, a nice guy who loved Dean. I told him of my plan—and another face lit up. He arranged for a studio truck and five guys to go the Riviera Country Club, pick up a hundred bags of golf clubs, and deliver them to Dean’s house right smack in the middle of his birthday party!

Patti and I were to arrive promptly at seven P.M., so I told the transportation head to have his truck and handlers arrive at 9:45—just about (I calculated) when Dean would be opening his presents.

The party was great, and Dean was his most outgoing. In later years, I’ve heard, he would often leave a dinner party at his house and go to the den to watch a Western on TV. Sometimes he’d call the cops to complain about the noise at his house! This wasn’t one of those nights. He was excited, alive, funny—delighted to be the center of attention. He was always incredible when he performed off the top of his head, and everyone there, including the guest of honor, was half bombed, to boot. Christ, did we laugh. . . .

Dean started to unwrap his gifts. Typical for him would be to open a box, throw the contents in the garbage, and thank the giver for the lovely wrapping paper. You had to be there to get it, but nobody could bring off a joke the way Dean could. His performance was effortless, pure grace and charm—not to mention that he was acting a wee bit drunker than he actually was.

Just as he was getting to the bottom of the pile, the doorbell rang. Jeannie (whom I’d let in on the gag) went to answer it. She swung the door open wide, allowing five men to enter the living room, each of them packing about four golf bags apiece.

“This is just for openers,” one of them announced.

They went back and forth from the driveway to the living room, setting bag upon bag upon bag against the wall for nearly thirty minutes. Dean’s eyes were bugging out of his head. He had absolutely no idea where all this was coming from, and, just as he was about to collapse with laughter, one of the guys took out a card and read: “To Dean, my partner and best friend. Here’s to never having to be without these. Love, Jerry.”

We hugged. The crowd cheered. And the five guys proceeded to take all the bags of clubs back outside, which took another half hour—while Dean kept asking, “How’d you
do
that? Where’d they
come
from?”

I just smiled.

What brought these two stories to mind? It just occurred to me, as I sat here writing, that never once in our ten years together did Dean give me a present. Not once, amid the scores of gifts I gave him—the gold-link watch, from Billy Ruser’s jewelry store on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, that he always treasured (check out our old
Colgate Comedy Hour
s, and you’ll find a sketch where water was spurting from a pipe in a wall and Dean was trying, in all seriousness, to protect that watch); the cigarette lighters; the golf clubs; the gorgeous diamond studs for his tux, with diamond cuff links to match; the solid-gold flask, et cetera.

Why was that?

I don’t think it was because he thought,
He doesn’t deserve it
. I think it was because he was taught that you didn’t do that. Men did not give other men presents, period.

I have been charged, now and then, with being a tad lavish in my gift-giving. Cross, Tiffany, Cartier, and Dunhill have done very well by me over the years—as has almost everybody who ever worked with me in television and the movies. But I also recognize that there is a certain selfishness to my gifts.

Here’s how it works: I get pleasure from giving to those I love. That’s
my
pleasure. But I’m perceptive enough to realize that there are those who have felt oppressed by my generosity. It’s not always easy to
get
when you can’t give back to the same degree. Once, after I’d given television sets to two of our
Colgate Comedy Hour
writers, Ed Simmons and Norman Lear, they retaliated by presenting me with a gift-wrapped old man—an actual living person whom they’d imprisoned inside a giant box for six hours. The card read, “For the Man Who Has Everything.”

Dean always used to take me to task for what he called
flag-waving
. In his book, that could mean any number of things. It could mean giving money to the needy. We would walk down the street together, and I literally couldn’t pass a man with his hat out. If there was one on every block, I’d hit each and every one. If we walked back the same way and the same guy was still there, I’d hit him again. Dean would say, “That fucker can get a job! What the fuck are you givin’ him money for?”

At the same time, I think he was happy to see me do what he couldn’t, even when he wanted to.

Flag-waving was tipping your mitt emotionally, showing your colors. It was loving parades, thinking Sophie Tucker was great, Al Jolson was a genius.

It was, of course, the exact opposite of everything Dean Martin had been taught to feel and—God knows—to show.

Putting it mildly, I knew I could sometimes be a bit much for him. I’d always worn my emotions on my sleeve, but as our career skyrocketed, the sleeve became a size extra large. I was constantly
rewarded
for showing my emotions. Everybody in the country—the critics included— jumped up and down for me. Did I feel bad that Dean was overshadowed? Sure I did. But did I also feel excited at what was happening? You bet your ass I did.

And so the more I got, the more I tried to give to Dean. But I recognize—now, fifty years later—that being at the receiving end of outrageous generosity isn’t the easiest thing in the world.

To make matters worse, Dean had claustrophobia. Literally. I mean, he wouldn’t ride in elevators if he could possibly avoid it. (He especially hated the backstage elevator at the Paramount, which was the size of a coffin and unreliable, to boot. Whenever we played there, he would walk the six flights from the stage to the dressing room, then back down, seven times a day—a round-trip for each of our shows! And the last time he lived in New York City, in 1948, he and Betty rented a lovely third-floor apartment on Riverside Drive and 106th Street. Dean would walk up the stairs.) We always had to get him two seats on planes, so he wouldn’t feel boxed in by another passenger. There were times when our dressing rooms were tight and he would dress at the hotel, then wait in the lobby of the club till showtime. It didn’t happen a lot, but enough for me to remember. I also recall that back at the beginning, when we’d dance with our wives in a club or a hotel ballroom, if the dance floor got even a little crowded, he was gone—sometimes leaving his wife stranded on the floor alone.

Dean’s worst moments were in the summer of 1951, when he learned we were going to have to work in a submarine.

We were just beginning preproduction on
Sailor Beware
for Hal Wallis. Preproduction involves a lot of things, but for the two of us it mainly meant reading the script and finding out what we’d be doing in the film! We knew there had been rumblings around the studio for months about Wallis’s plan to do a Martin and Lewis film in the Navy. When we heard the talk, we didn’t much care. We had a contract, and we would do the work we were told to do. (Does it sound joyless? It wasn’t always. But Hal Wallis did a lot to make it feel that way.)

Then we found out that
Sailor Beware
wasn’t just about the Navy—it was about the Silent Service, submarines.

Holy Christ!

I spoke with Wallis about Dean’s phobia, and he assured me that we would be working in mock-ups. No fourth wall, plenty of space when it was needed. I explained to Dean that he wouldn’t have to be in a real live submarine, and he was relieved—until we got to the location, the Naval Training Station at San Diego, aka the West Coast Main Facility of Submarine Warfare and Strategic Information of the United States Navy. Very, very impressive. And, to my partner, very unnerving.

After we checked into the Grant Hotel in San Diego, we were summoned by our assistant director to meet at the dock at San Diego Naval Pier and to board the U.S.S. Bashaw, a war submarine that would take us for a trial run from the pier to the outer ocean beyond Point Loma. Dean was fine until the sub’s commander, Captain Bob Froude, told us, in the kindest possible way, that no one could stand topside during a sub’s movement, particularly in the bay area.

So we boarded the submarine, and were invited to the captain’s wardroom, some thirty feet below deck. That’s when I saw Dean waver. He didn’t just waver. He bent, looking like a Slinky trying to find a place to hide. But down the conning-tower stairs we went—Dean, me, the captain, our assistant director, and some of the cast.

The padded walls of the wardroom were covered with plaques and photographs of the
Bashaw
in action—diving, trimming, sitting in port, under way. I stared, fascinated, until I noticed Dean getting really uncomfortable.

I asked the captain if we could talk. We walked to one side of the room, and as Dean stood with a bunch of fellow cast members, pretending to have a good time, I explained the problem to Captain Froude.

The captain nodded, understanding, then asked Dean and me to accompany him back to the conning tower and up the steps to the deck. Once we were up top, Captain Froude explained to us that since the sub would not be diving we could stay on deck the whole time. My partner looked at me with real gratitude.

The funny thing is, Frank was claustrophobic, too. Except that Frank never had to work with a partner.